A timeline where Sega beat Nintendo would’ve been so much better – Reader’s Feature

As Sega tries to revive its classic franchises, a reader imagines a world where the Dreamcast was not a flop and the Mega Drive beat the SNES.

With Xbox going multiformat and PlayStation also beginning to dabble, it really does seem like the era of console wars is coming to an end. There are lots of sensible reasons to think this is a bad thing, including the lack of competition to drive innovation, and the decline of format exclusives – which are also used to push the consoles and the artform beyond the normal limits.

People celebrating the death of exclusives will live to regret it, I feel, when Xbox and PlayStation no longer have any reason to push the envelope, to show off, and we end up with less interesting games as a result.

But the real reason I would not like to see them end is that console wars are fun. As long as you’re not an idiot about it, arguing about which is the best console and games is very entertaining. And that was never truer then with the greatest of all console wars: Mega Drive vs. SNES.

As you’ve probably already guessed, I had a Mega Drive and was a major Sega fanboy during the 90s. At first it seemed as if Sega could do nothing wrong. They were the cool ones, and Nintendo was the old fuddy duddy that had green blood and made games for babies. Mega Drive owners easily outnumbered SNES at my school and as I understand it that was true all across the UK.

But, as we know, Nintendo won the war overall – even if it was pretty close. It was said that the release of Donkey Kong Country is what pushed them over the edge, but I think it’d be more honest to say that Sega destroyed themselves. By the end of the Mega Drive era they were knocking tons of pointless and expensive add-ons, and they had no clear plan with the next generation, which is what got us the bodge job that was the Saturn.

I have very fond memories of the Dreamcast but by that point it was too late and not only was Sega’s name mud, but they were broke too. So they went third party and have basically been a joke ever since. They’ve been talking about a comeback lately, with lots of new entries in classic franchises. but I don’t think Shinboi: Art Of Vengeance has been a very good start to that and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the others flop. It’s just been too long for anyone to really care any more.

But imagine if the situation was reversed! What if the Nintendo PlayStation went ahead and it was them that got obsessed with expensive add-ons nobody wanted and then got caught out with the new generation. Imagine if Sega realised early on that the Saturn needed to be a 3D beast, not a 2D machine, and they made something closer to the Dreamcast, that could handle ports of all their arcade games.

For me, the loss of Sega’s arcade business was what really killed them. All their technical innovation came from the arcades and without that and the Dreamcast, well… we’ve seen what they’ve been like the last couple of decades. Obviously, arcades were going to die out at some point anyway, but Sega could’ve slowly migrated their big arcade franchises to consoles and their technical expertise at the same time.

Imagine a world where the best 3D graphics are all in Sega games. Sounds absurd? At the time of Daytona USA that was exactly the situation, and yet Sega let it all slip from their fingers in just a couple of years. Nintendo was similar – the N64 was much more powerful than the PS1 – but Nintendo just lost interest in being cutting edge and they’ve never really gone back.

They’d definitely made plenty of great games since then but if Sega had thrived, instead of dying with the Dreamcast… we’d be on a Dreamcast 4 by now. It’d be a cutting edge machine, all of its classic franchises would still be going, and you’d have both great graphics and great gameplay, instead of just one with Nintendo.

Sega wasn’t afraid of having more mature themes or violence in their games either, with their role-players and things like Streets Of Rage. I feel that a dominant Sega would’ve allowed other publishers to make whatever they want, and they would’ve had the most powerful console, which is the opposite of Nintendo.

It’s interesting to think of but of course none of this happened and there’s no way that Sega can turn the clocks back. The best they can do is try and make something other than just Sonic and PC strategy games, but I’m dubious they can even do that well. Not in this timeline anyway.

By reader BobbyD

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